


every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

by Naraht



Series: Lilia & Yakov [3]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: 5 Things, Age Difference, Divorce, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 04:14:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17257385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: Lilia and Yakov, getting together and falling apart.





	every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

**Author's Note:**

> It seems quite a few different _Yuri on Ice_ fics, including my own, give a version of Lilia and Yakov's backstory that's fairly similar. But there are a lot more ways that it could have happened. In this fic I briefly explore a few of the other possibilities.

**1.**

It was never a grand romance. They were both past forty-five; they had both devoted their lives to their careers. He was in need of a new choreographer and she came recommended by a friend of a friend. They became lovers quickly, each of them for the other merely the latest in a long string of lovers.

And yet out of this, out of the new possibilities of the nineties, something blossomed. In a fit of unaccustomed enthusiasm, they decided to marry.

It didn't last. Neither of them had any practice with compromise, and in the end there was nothing to hold them together. They parted again, without recriminations, after three years of marriage.

**2.**

They met in Munich. 

A decade earlier he'd defected to Switzerland, where he still lived and coached. He regretted nothing; indeed, he considered himself happy. Nonetheless, sometimes he felt a certain nostalgia for his country and people. When he read in a newspaper that the Bolshoi Ballet would be coming on tour to Munich, he booked himself a ticket on a whim.

She had been firmly warned against speaking to émigrés. She never listened. Going to that party, thrown by a member of Munich's small Russian community, changed both their lives. They slept together that night. By the morning he had persuaded her to defect too.

Over the coming years they lived in Milan, then in Paris, and finally – following her career – in New York City. As he liked to say, only half in jest, they were 'rootless cosmopolitans.' They enjoyed their life and lived it to the full.

A year or two after the millennium they moved back to Russia, making their new home in the city that was once again called Saint Petersburg. That was when they realised how much they had been tied together by the shared experience of being Russian Jews in exile: speaking the same language, laughing at the same jokes. That was when they fell apart.

**3.**

He was forty-five, a Master of Sport of the Soviet Union with an Olympic medal but no wife at home. She was barely twenty, a new dancer at the Bolshoi and already beginning to be talked about as the next great talent.

One evening he came to her dressing room to congratulate her after a performance. He said that he had never seen anyone so talented – he, who had seen Dudinskaya and Ulanova dance. This sort of praise seemed new to her then.

He had travelled the world. She had only seen the inside of a ballet studio. He coached her everywhere but on stage. Occasionally he exclaimed over what he could have made of her as a figure skater. They married when she was still twenty-one.

Within a few years she was more famous than he had ever been. She travelled the world too. She was an artist and a performer while he was only a coach, shining in the reflected glory of others. He ought to have been glad for her. He wasn't. He was used to being the one around whom everything else revolved.

He called her selfish. He told her that if she left, she could never come back. (He would say the same to Victor before too long.)

Lilia didn't care. It was her turn.

**4.**

They hardly remembered when it was that they first met. This party, that reception, that ceremony: Moscow was like a small town that way. They crossed paths for years before they began taking any real notice of one another. Years later, her friends laughed remembering her comments about _that Yakov Feltsman who thinks that figure skating is an art_.

And yet somehow they came together in the end. It felt inevitable. They got married eventually, because this too was inevitable. (They liked to think of themselves as bohemians, but when it came down to it, they knew what was expected.)

"You know I never want children," she said flatly when he proposed. Over the years he lost count of the number of her abortions. It was none of his business. 

Her injury came when she was forty-two and he was forty-seven. Career-ending, they said in retrospect. She knew the order of events better. Had it not been for the unexpected pregnancy, she thought could have gone back.

"It's our last chance," he said. It was the one time she listened. 

Their son was called Felix Yakovlevich Baranovsky. She claimed rights over the family name; he chose the first name. _Lucky._

Figure skating or ballet? That was the only question. 'Neither' was hardly an option.

Like his mother, he enrolled at the Moscow State Academy of Choreography. Like his mother, he graduated into the Bolshoi Ballet. Like his mother, he became one of their youngest principals in history. Two years later he left ballet for good.

Lilia stopped speaking to him – or perhaps he stopped speaking to her. It didn't matter, because the breakdown was complete. It was the end between Yakov and Lilia as well.

**5.**

He was an awkward, aspiring eighteen, his skin just beginning to clear – not yet realising that he'd finally grown into his big hands, not yet worried about his hair. He was still a few years short of his competitive peak. She was twenty-three, already a soloist at the Bolshoi.

For the sake of some foreign photographer, to show off the glamor and sophistication of Soviet sports training, they brought him and a few others from his sport club to the Bolshoi for a ballet class. She loitered in the doorway of the studio, watching the goings-on alongside some of her friends. The photographer asked them to change into tutus to make the picture more dramatic.

She laughed at his technique. She engaged him in conversation afterwards. After going to watch one of his practice sessions the following week, she seduced him, which required only hinting broadly enough for him to notice. The photographs were published abroad and they never saw them.

They married within months, for all the usual reasons: to demonstrate their love for one another, to have an apartment of their own, to be able to have sex without the need for complicated assignations in borrowed rooms.

They divorced several years later, as he was coming to the end of his skating career. It was not so unusual: they had married young, they had grown apart. Many of their acquaintances were getting divorced too. They stayed friends.

Long after the Soviet Union had come to an end too, someone sent Lilia a copy of an old American magazine with a note to look at page 8. It held those long-ago pictures of them. He was in a white vest and leggings, strong and anxious, studying himself in a mirror. She was gazing unashamedly at him, her tutu almost wider than the doorway she was leaning through.

She took the magazine to him. Together they exclaimed about how unbelievably young they had been. And yet it became clear to him then – in a way that had never struck him before – that he had been by far the younger.

**Author's Note:**

> Which of these do you find most plausible? Or do you have your own headcanon for Yakov and Lilia's relationship?


End file.
